


six ways from sunday

by nymphae



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alcoholism, Angst, High School AU, Multi, Polyamory, recreational drug use (mild)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-02 21:49:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4075042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nymphae/pseuds/nymphae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts out like a soap opera, and they all hate it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	six ways from sunday

**Author's Note:**

> A few things to remember: this is in the modern day, obviously. Everyone's ages are kind of crammed together and rearranged a little to make it fit (I'd say Bellamy's eighteen and a senior, Raven's an eighteen-year-old junior, and Clarke's your standard seventeen-year-old junior). Most everybody lives, parents are jerks, and so are teenagers. I think of "Tyrants" by Catfish and the Bottlemen as this fic's theme song, but that's just me. ("Preach" by Drake would also work I think, but in vibe more than lyrical meaning.)
> 
> As far as warnings: Clarke is seventeen here, hence the Underage tag. The alcoholism is tied mostly to Raven's mother and their home life, but since I don't know enough about portraying alcoholism properly, I've tried to keep away from it and would call this warning mild. The recreational drug use tag is weed, in case that's triggering for anyone. It's mentioned only a handful of times and is also mild. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Thanks to [Maggie](http://atougherlove.tumblr.com) for saving my ass. I owe you one.

The Drop is easily Clarke’s favorite coffee shop for a number of reasons.

One, it’s closer to Mecha City High School than it is to Phoenix Academy, so she doesn’t have to run into classmates when she goes there to study. Two, their prices are way lower than those at The Coffee Can. Three, it’s far enough from her house that she can take her time driving home and use it as an excuse. Four, one of the baristas is very, very cute and knows her order because this is her home away from home. Five, Finn doesn’t go there and therefore she won’t run into him, either.

She discovered it sophomore year and has been coming ever since. It’s good for meet-ups with friends or long study sessions (no one bothers you) or, in today’s case, getting a latte with your boyfriend’s other girlfriend.

Yeah, Clarke knows how that sounds.

It all started when she met Finn at a party two months ago. He had the kind of smile that made her feel warm inside and rocked the floppy-haired puppy look that turns her knees weak. He never ignored a text or a phone call, and his hands were always warm when he touched her. She liked him. She _really_ liked him. Unlike with her last few flings, she couldn’t really think of a quality she didn’t like about him—his laugh, his finely-boned hands, his too-long hair, his stupid jokes, et cetera. She also liked the smell of his room and how, when it was late and they were driving around aimlessly looking for something to do, he’d reach for her knee instead of the gearshift and smile like he knew something she didn’t.

Which, of course, he did. It’d been a stinging blow when Clarke showed up at the Mecha City High School football game to surprise him and, after the big win, watched a slim dark-haired beauty tackle him in a hug. And then watched as they kissed, and kept watching as everyone cheered them on.

She hadn’t known what to do. Pop culture and common sense told her she should confront him angrily and demand an explanation, but that didn’t feel right. Clarke is more overwhelmed and confused by her emotions than she is run by them. She thinks things through, thinks too much. So she just politely and carefully avoided him for about a week, didn’t say a word to anyone about it. She thought briefly about telling Wells, but that certainly didn’t feel right either. So she asked around instead.

It was Monty Green, the kid in her physics class, who gave her the useful information. “Yeah, I know Finn,” he said as he scribbled equations across his paper. He’s a transfer from Mecha, which is why Clarke asked him in the first place. He’s also amiable and oblivious enough that he didn’t catch anything suspicious behind Clarke’s questions. “He’s dating Raven Reyes.”

As any girl of her generation must, Clarke took to the computer. Google didn’t reveal much, but it did take her to a Facebook page. Clarke doesn’t have a Facebook. Contrary to her expectations, Raven Reyes’s profile picture was not one of her and Finn. After four hours of limited stalking (Raven Reyes, 18, attends Mecha City High School, is in a relationship with Finn Collins), nail-biting, and fretting, Clarke made a profile and sent one of the weirdest messages she’d ever sent in her life.

Thirty minutes later she’d checked back to find _Seen 9:13 PM._ Fair enough.

Flash to the present and… Yeah. Okay, so Clarke hadn’t actually expected the girl to show up. Okay, so she hadn’t actually planned a speech. Okay, so now the intimidatingly pretty Raven Reyes is staring at her from across the table and it’s been three whole minutes of silence.

“So,” Clarke says awkwardly, steadily scratching the pattern off the coffee cup, “I know this is weird, but I remembered you from Miller’s party last month.” This is a lie to soften the blow. “I’m—”

“—the girl who’s been sleeping with my boyfriend,” Raven finishes flatly. She’s got very dark, sharp eyes and a mouth that was made for either sneering or kissing. Both of these features are accentuated by her pulled-back hair.

Clarke’s mouth works uselessly in shock before she says stupidly, “You know.”

The corner of Raven’s mouth twitches as she leans back. “Yeah,” she says. “So. Talk.” She raises her eyebrows coolly as Clarke silently opens her mouth. “What? You were going to tell me it was nothing, right? That you didn’t know about me? That you’re sorry?”

Clarke feels very small all of a sudden. “I _didn’t_ know,” she says quietly. “And I _am_ sorry.”

Raven looks unimpressed. “Right,” she says. “Of course you are.”

“I’ll break it off, obviously,” Clarke says, feeling unbelievably stupid. She picks at her fingernails. “And I’m sorry, I just…” She laughs nervously. “I haven’t exactly been in this situation before.”

Raven just stares at her. “Oh,” she laughs. It sounds short and insulting. “Oh, you were thinking we were going to be _friends_.” Her expression sours.

“Oh, no,” Clarke blurts. “No, I didn’t—” She flounders for words, shrinking under the glare of this beautiful girl.

Raven sighs, a short huff of air. “I don’t know what I expected,” she mutters, more to herself than to Clarke.  She stands abruptly. “Look, this was great and everything, but I’m not interested in having a heart-to-heart and braiding each other’s hair.”

Clarke furrows her brows. “I just thought we could help each other,” she says. “After a break-up like this—”

“I’m not breaking up with him,” Raven interrupts.

Clarke stares at her open-mouthed. “You’re not,” she echoes.

Raven rolls her eyes. “You’ve been fooling around with him for what, a few months?” she asks. Clarke blinks. Raven continues, “I’ve known him since birth. He is far too important to me to lose over something as stupid as… _this._ ” The pause, Clarke guesses, was Raven deciding whether or not to say _you_. (She appreciates the restraint.)

Raven turns on her heel to go, and Clarke—against better judgment—reaches out to hook her fingers into the arm of her jacket. Raven glares at her hand with the heat of a thousand suns, her mouth and jaw tight. Clarke releases her slowly, the way one might back away from a furious animal.

“Sorry,” she says again. “Just take my number, okay? We can—I don’t know, talk.” She offers up a scrap of paper upon which a series of numbers is scribbled.

Raven looks at the paper, looks at Clarke. She crumples it in her fist pointedly before walking out. Clarke watches her go, wishing she could disappear into the floor.

 

If Raven were about forty years older than she is now, she might just classify this achy burn in her chest as a medical emergency. She’s not, though, so she knows it’s really just a toxic combination of anger, disgust, and guilt. It’s showing and she knows it. Her face has settled into that stiff, pissed-off look that she hates on herself and she’s snapping at everything that moves.

It’s Monday, so that means Finn leaves sixth period early to go to work and can’t drive her home. She spends an hour doing calculus on the school’s front steps until Bellamy (who doesn’t have a sixth period) finishes running errands and picks her up. They get three orders of greasy fries from the only clean burger joint in town and then drive back to the school to sit around, eat, do homework, and talk shit until Octavia gets out of soccer practice at five-thirty. Today is a typical Monday, except today Raven’s more hostile than usual, so the drive back to the high school is quiet.

When Bellamy pulls into the parking spot, he turns down the radio. “Want to tell me about that little incident at The Drop yesterday?”

She frowns. He’d immediately caught on to her bad mood and kept conversation either to a minimum or to safe subjects like homework and what an utter asshole Ms. Sydney is. She doesn’t appreciate the one-eighty. She thought they’d had a silent agreement, that Raven would ignore the fact that her weird-ass meeting was during his shift and that he would ignore that she had a weird-ass meeting at all. “What?” she says flatly.

He’s not deterred by her tone. “The stare-off with the little blonde,” he says. “Made the entire fucking shop sweat.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Raven says. She digs her hand into the hot bag on her lap and plucks out a fry. It doesn’t help the cesspool forming in her chest.

Finn has been a part of her life for as long as her life has existed. They were together from diapers, friends if nothing else. Raven has more family in him than she does in both her parents and distant aunts, uncles, and cousins. He, at least, was there. When she didn’t have lunch, he would always have an extra granola bar or a juice box. When her mom came home angry and drunk, his window would always be open. When she cried, he was always there to hold her hand. She loves him. A long, drawn-out kind of love. She _loves_ him.

Bellamy knows this. He goes to the same high school as her and Finn and he’s not stupid, so he also knows that in the past few years Finn has been having trouble with fidelity. He _also_ knows that Raven doesn’t talk about it. Ever.

“Raven,” he sighs, rubs a hand over the curve of the steering wheel. Raven knows most people get stuck on the obvious parts of him like the thickness of his arms or his imperfect smile, but it’s his hands that she likes most. They’re not always clean, but they’re always sure and steady and strong. She felt secure in them the first time they slept together.

“Bellamy,” she shoots back. They glare at each other. If she doesn’t say anything more, he’ll drop it. He is one of those rare people who understands silence, understands when things can’t be said. He doesn't treat them like they're made of glass, but he doesn't poke at them either. And he never makes it uncomfortable. It's part of what drew her to him as a friend in the first place. (And, as a lesser thought: people like them, people with missing parts and cracked insides, need to stick together.)

She makes a snap decision to rip off the Band-Aid. “She’s Finn’s other girlfriend.” She decides not to mention that the girl’s phone number sits in her jacket pocket, crumpled and re-crumpled but _there_.

Disapproval flickers over Bellamy’s face. “Oh,” is all he says. He had once, before they fucked, asked if she wanted him to handle it. Those were the words he used: _handle it._ By then they’d been friends for over a year, and Raven was one of the few people that knew the protective part of him was not some petty, angry possessiveness. (No one forgot the beating Atom took as a freshman for screwing over Octavia, but no one looked any deeper into it.) She never knew exactly what he meant, though. She had just said, flat and firm, _no_.

After a verse and a chorus of the new Taylor Swift song on the radio, Bellamy asks, “What do you want to do?”

She doesn’t know if he’s referring to the present—as in the time they’ve got to kill—or the future—as in her disintegrating love life. She looks out the window. There is no one around. She puts the bag of fries into the foot well between her knees and unbuckles her seatbelt. “How long until Octavia’s done?”

“Twenty-five minutes, give or take.”

“Good.” She yanks out the elastic keeping her hair up. “Push your seat back.”

He eyes her warily. “Raven…”

She gives him a daring look. “You asked me what I want,” she says.

They look at each other in a silent standoff. As always, he’s the one who gives. He reaches down to slide the seat back, and she settles into the empty space more easily than the last two times, her knees fitting comfortably on either side of him as his hands mold to her hips.

By the time Octavia emerges from the building, sweaty wisps of hair sticking to her face, they’ve returned to their respective spots as though nothing’s happened. Octavia takes one look at them from the backseat, at their reddened mouths, and snorts.

Bellamy ignores it. “Everything good?” he asks, putting the car in reverse. Raven can feel the younger girl’s accusing eyes on the back of her neck.

“Hand me the fries,” is all Octavia says.

Raven takes a little pride in the fact that people know better than to push her.

 

When Clarke comes in the house, it smells like good things—cheese and meat and garlic. She grins as she toes off her shoes. “Are you making lasagna?” she calls.

“You bet,” her dad calls back. He’s a tall, big, broad guy that makes every hug feel bear-like and comforting. The type of big guy that fills up their kitchen and every doorway he stands in. Even now Clarke struggles to fit her arms completely around him.

“Hi, honey,” her mom says as she breezes in. She’s shifting papers in her hands and wearing a deep frown, which means either Clarke or her dad will have to pry them away from her. Of the two of them, she is the one Clarke looks most like, but even that isn’t much. There’s too much weight on her mouth, a dark intensity to her eyes that Clarke doesn’t have. Wells’s dad had the same look to his face; Wells used to say it was a side effect of politics. “Wells called,” Abby says. “And Finn, too.”

Clarke doesn’t reply immediately, because she knows. They’d called her cell first. “I’ll call them back later,” she says nonchalantly.

Her dad hears the falseness immediately and gives her a curious look. “Everything okay?”

Abby is pulled from her work hypnosis by this. The look _she_ gives Clarke is less concerned than it is sharp. “Clarke?”

“Everything’s fine,” Clarke says.

Once safely in her room she deletes Finn’s voicemail without listening to it and sends him what she hopes is a neutral, suspicion-free text explaining why she missed his call in the first place and how busy she’s been. Then she calls Wells. It’s been a long time since they’ve talked, since Clarke found out he was in love with her and chickened out of what she felt was an obligated relationship. Then she’d essentially shunned him. She’s still embarrassed and guilty about it.

“Clarke,” Wells says, voice tinny over the line.

“Hey,” she says, fiddles aimlessly with the frayed blanket on her bed.

“You called me first,” he reminds her patiently after a beat.

“Yeah. Sorry.” She wants to emphasize the broadness of that sorry ( _sorry I hurt your feelings, sorry I avoided you, sorry I’m a shitty friend_ ), but she just says, “I fucked up.” There’s another beat of horrible silence after she tells him what’s going on, and she feels unbelievably guilty that she’s coming to him only because it’s convenient for her and that she’s being unfair.

“Break up with him,” Wells says at last.

“I know, but I—”

“Clarke,” he interrupts evenly. “You called because you want my advice. Break up with him.”

She opens her mouth, closes her mouth, opens her mouth again. “What about her?” she asks.

There’s a staticky huff of air over the line that maybe could be a laugh, but it sounds nothing like Wells’s laugh. She knows because she grew up hearing it. “Avoid her,” he says. “You’re good at that.” And then he hangs up on her.

She approaches it like she does everything: logically, methodically. She plans out every single way the conversation could go, agonizes over every hypothetical in class and while she’s driving and when she’s supposed to be writing a paper on the themes of _Hamlet_ at The Drop. She’s chewing on her pen, staring at the blinking cursor of her empty Word document, when a tap on her shoulder makes her jump violently. She blinks, dumbfounded, up at the cute barista before yanking out her earbuds. “Sorry, what?”

“It’s closing time,” says the guy. “You’ve been here for, like, six hours.”

Clarke stares first at the clock on her laptop and then the dark street outside. “Oh,” she says lamely. “Oh, I didn’t realize.” She hurries to pack up, conscious of the way the barista waits by the door. Out of his apron he seems bigger, broader. Hotter.

“I’ll see you around,” she says lamely, shouldering her bag. She’s got a long string of text messages from her mother to answer, and there will be at least one tired and angry parent to face when she gets home.

“Hold on,” he says. When she looks up at him he’s looking at the empty parking lot and stark street with narrowed eyes. “Where did you park?”

“Um.” Clarke slides her phone into her back pocket. “In the alley. The lot was full when I got here.” The alley is down the lot and between this plaza and the next, just barely wide enough for her little sedan. It’s also full of empty beer cans and cigarette butts, and is a veritable gate to hell after the light fades. The two of them stand in silence for a minute, both remembering these facts. Somewhere in the distance a dog is barking.

“I’ll walk you,” the barista says.

She eyes him with mild surprise and ingrained suspicion, but he’s already several steps ahead of her. She has to hurry to catch up; his legs are much longer than hers. “Thank you,” she says, and it comes out sounding kind of like a question.

“Don’t stay so late,” he replies.

“Sorry?” This comes out sounding kind of like a challenge.

He shakes his head. His hair is too long. “This isn’t your kind of neighborhood, princess.” He’s not looking at her, so he misses her surprised scowl at the nickname. He shrugs nevertheless. “I mean, if you have to, don’t park so far away. Or make sure somebody’s with you.”

“Thanks,” Clarke says shortly, grudgingly. “I can take care of myself.” Her keychain has brass knuckles and a mini can of mace jangling alongside her keys. She still remembers most of the stuff from her self-defense class.

“Right,” says the barista after a minute, but she can tell he doesn’t really believe her. She’s used to it. She’s small and delicate-looking. Not much of a threat at all.

She unlocks the car and opens the driver’s door, making sure not to turn her back. Strangers must always be faced _._ “I’m—”

“Clarke,” finishes the guy. He gives a sharp little half-smile. “I know. You’re a Phoenix girl, right?”

Clarke looks down at herself before realizing she’s not actually wearing the Phoenix Academy uniform. She gives him an inquisitive look.

“You’re friends with my sister,” he explains shortly. “Octavia.”

“Oh,” says Clarke. She thinks of the small, pretty girl who goes to the same community service gigs as she does—Clarke to beef up her college applications, Octavia to avoid going to juvie. “Yeah.”

This guy doesn’t look much like Octavia, except for the eyes and something about the nose. “I’m Bellamy,” he says.

He shuts her door for her and stands there, hands in pockets, until she backs into the street and can’t see him anymore.

 

Bellamy has been sleeping with Raven for exactly three months, one week, and two days.

He’s not really sure if _sleeping with_ is something you can measure like that. It’s an irregular thing, not like _dating_ or _being in love with_. It’s a thing where Raven has a boyfriend and Bellamy doesn’t have anyone, where she’s hot and cold, and he’s at her mercy. It’s a thing where he gets all of the sex and none of the strings. It's supposed to be a good thing. Not that they’ve ever talked about it. It was a favor before it was a thing.

He’s always liked her. Her sharp mouth and wit and intelligence makes her appealing to him, even outside of the body she dresses in loose t-shirts and tank tops and stained jeans. He befriended her in their pre-calculus class junior year—she was a year ahead in math and still is—and used to think, when they met up for lunch or did homework together, that she was a good kind of possibility. He’d listen to her run her mouth and watch her roll her eyes and think there _maybe could have_ been something…if she wasn’t so in love with Finn.

He’d been standing next to her when he found out Finn was really just a piece of shit packaged into an amiable dude. It was right after school; Raven forgot something in her locker, and they’d doubled back for it. Only her row was blocked off by Roma and Finn, who were apparently glued at the mouth. Bellamy had gaped, uncomprehending, until Raven stiffly used her body to shove him into the adjacent hallway, out of their eyesight. Her face and neck were flushed with what he imagined was embarrassment and anger.

“Don’t,” was the only thing she would say.

“Okay,” was the only thing he could say.

He drove her home in silence. He had never been inside the little one-floored house with the chipping paint and sagging porch, would never ask. Raven shouldered her backpack and pushed open the door. Then she paused, her body tight and rigid, and she said, “Thanks.”

He knows more than most people that being pitied is worse than being poor or alone or fucked up, but in that moment he felt sorry for her.

He started allotting more time for her, doing her favors, giving her rides, all subtly so she wouldn’t think it was charity or pity. It never was; he just wanted to help. On a Friday night in October she’d appeared on his porch with a bottle of vodka under her jacket and a hollowness in her eyes. She’d walked. “Want a drink?” she’d asked. How is one supposed to say no to a sight like that?

An hour later they were watching Michael Corleone kill two guys in a restaurant and Raven said, words slurring just a tad, “I wish I could go back in time and fuck Al Pacino.”

Bellamy was sitting slumped on the couch, very conscious of Raven’s cheek leaning against his knee from where she sat on the floor, feeling buzzed but not drunk. “Me, too,” he said, and she scoffed.

She shifted, pressed a hand to the inside of his calf. “I’m pretty hot, right?” she asked after a moment. “Like…right?”

“You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he said, and then laughed so she wouldn’t know he wasn’t joking.

She laughed with him, a full-throated sound followed by a cute snort, and then she turned, placed her hands on his knees, and leaned towards him. He remembers thinking a steady stream of _shit shit shit shit._

“Really,” she said. “Tell me.”

“You’re pretty _and_ hot,” he told her, heart pounding, blood rushing. She kissed him, open-mouthed and sloppy, until he pulled away and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Moving on,” she said, and he knew that wasn’t how it was supposed to go, but she smelled good and she was staring at his mouth while she said it, and he was not a strong-willed man in these things.

They fucked on the couch using the condom in his wallet (not that he’s presumptuous), and then she slept in his bed with her cheek pressed against his chest, responding to his _are you sure_ with a grunted, “Mom won’t care.” His mother and sister weren’t awake to catch him sneaking her out in the morning.

He drove her home sleepily, shying away from the cold. She didn’t get out of the car right away. He thought that neither of them were quite sure what, if anything, to say. He finally settled on, “Did it help?”

And she replied, “No.” She squeezed his hand instead of kissing him goodbye, and after she’d gone he idled for a very long time at the stop sign at the end of the road, waiting for his heartbeat to quiet or his stomach to feel less caustic or both.

Three months, one week, and two days later, it’s no longer a favor. It’s…a thing. He’s generally good with words—he’s got a couple of essay competitions under his belt and always aces his presentations—but when it comes to her, he fumbles.

Twice during the week (when the other guy can’t) he gives her rides home from school, and on weekends (when the other guy can’t) he spends long hours kissing her in the backseat of his car or wandering around after her up at GoSci Point or sharing blunts with her in their backyards.

She doesn’t talk about Finn and he doesn’t ask. Instead they talk about calculus or old indie albums or the evil of Corleones and Underwoods. There’s a lot they don’t tell each other. He’s sure he doesn’t know half of what she’s holding back.

As for him, well. He doesn’t tell her about the ending to season 1 of _House of Cards_. He doesn’t tell her that Finn’s a complete douche. He certainly doesn’t tell her that he sleeps better when he is feeling her pulse under his hands.

That would do more harm than good, he thinks.

 

Clarke picks the park between her house and Finn’s because it’s a safe, neutral place without meaning for either of them. She thinks about the diner where they went on a bunch of dates, and her house, and her favorite yogurt place, but all of that seems too harsh. She shows up at the park twenty minutes early and waits for thirty more, fretting in the driver’s seat. When she gets out of the car, he’s waiting for her on the swings.

“Long time, no see,” he calls out. His grin sort of hurts to look at.

“Yeah,” Clarke says lamely.

He sees her expression and stops swinging. “What?” he asks. “Who died?”

 _Our relationship,_ she almost says. Instead she sits down next to him, looks at her shoes and then at him. She’s not good at this. She’s dumped people twice and been dumped once. She broke up with Anya because she didn’t know how to be with a girl, didn’t know how to be as upfront and open with it as Anya did. That conversation was clumsy and unpleasant, anticlimactic and pathetic. She broke up with Wells because it didn’t feel right and she hadn’t learned her lesson. There wasn’t a conversation, just uncomfortable silence. She was dumped by Lexa when she couldn’t handle the bad blood between their high schools and their families, and that conversation was short and painful, more angry than tearful.

Basically, she’s got a bad track record and nothing to lose.

“I’m breaking up with you,” she says bluntly.

Finn stares at her. “You’re—what?”

Her frustration overcomes her reluctance. “I’m _breaking up with you_ ,” she repeats.

He just frowns, and she wonders if he’s ever been dumped before. Probably not, she thinks with a grimace. “I don’t understand,” he says. “Things have been good. I mean, I know we haven’t really talked lately, but you said—”

“Finn,” Clarke interrupts. “You have another girlfriend.”

He reels like he’s been slapped. “Clarke, I can—”

“Shut up,” she says. He shuts up. She shakes her head. “You have another girlfriend, and you cheated on her. With me.” She looks at him incredulously. “You realize that’s a dealbreaker, right?”

“I—”

“There’s not really anything you can say that’ll change the outcome of this conversation,” Clarke tells him.

He says, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” she says. She gets up, letting the swing hit the back of her knees, and gives him a hard pat on the shoulder. “Don’t call me.”

Despite the guilt and hurt, she smiles as she drives away.

A few hours later finds her at The Drop, burying herself in homework. She’s struggling over the characterizations in the _Odyssey_ when Bellamy the barista pulls one of her earbuds out. He’s been doing so at a reasonable hour so neither of them have to worry about it being dark and dangerous. “Is it time already?” she asks. It’s still light out, though barely.

“Near enough.” Unprompted, he sits in the empty chair across from her with what she guesses is a couple of stolen cookies from the display case. She doesn’t comment. “You look cheerful,” he remarks.

She says, “I broke up with my boyfriend today.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “I’m…sorry?”

Clarke laughs. “No, it’s a good thing. I think.” She doesn’t offer up any other information, and he smoothly changes the subject:

“So,” he says, breaking off a piece of oatmeal raisin, “what is it that you’re studying at your overpriced private school?” It’s the kind of line that might be an inside joke down the line; he asks her this sometimes without expecting much of an answer, although he’s offered valuable insight on her homework—be it calculus or literature—on a handful of occasions.

She quirks a brow. “You know anything about Odysseus?”

He grins briefly, a startlingly genuine flash of white teeth. “I know of him,” he says.

“Oh yeah?” Clarke says, amused.

Bellamy gives her an imperious look. “I’ll bet this cookie that I know more than you, princess,” he says. “I don’t even need to see the text.”

She loses the cookie pathetically fast. He mocks her, but he helps her out with the rest of her study guide questions until closing, and then he walks her to her car again.

“Thanks for the help,” she says genuinely as she unlocks the doors.

“Anytime, princess,” he replies. He pauses, then adds, “Actually, it’d be better if it weren’t during my shift.”

Clarke raises her eyebrows. “Are you offering to tutor me?”

“What are you reading next in class?”

“The _Iliad_.”

He snorts. “Then you should be begging me to tutor you,” he says wryly. But he cuts the matter-of-fact tone long enough to trade numbers.

So it becomes a regular deal. For the next few weeks Clarke meets Bellamy at the diner on her side of town (“Just humor me, princess. I can’t think in that goddamn café.”) and they do homework for a solid few hours. He’s arrogant and sort of haughty sometimes, but he can make an excellent point and he seems to enjoy arguing as much as she does. One of the waitresses, Anita, is a family friend, which means they usually end up with an extra shake or order of fries.

Unlike Clarke, Bellamy is not partial to distractions. If she’s talking too much, he’ll tell her to get back to work. If she’s using her phone too much, he’ll take it and sit on it. His memory is sort of scary; she’ll ask about Patroclus or Ajax and he’ll spout off biographical info like he’s memorized a Wikipedia page. It’s impressive, but she’d never say that.

It doesn’t seem weird when Bellamy asks to meet on a Monday instead of a Tuesday. She pulls up to the diner with a head running with questions and a book marked up in purple ink, and she finds Raven Reyes sitting beside him in the booth.

She stops abruptly. The way they’re looking at her—Bellamy nonchalantly, Raven unhappily, but without surprise—means that Clarke’s the only one caught off-guard here.

“Is this a joke?” she asks finally.

“No,” Raven says shortly. Her posture isn’t necessarily defensive (her legs are uncrossed, her arms unfolded, a pencil in one hand and a physics book under her elbow) but it isn’t welcoming, either. “Sit down.”

Clarke looks at Bellamy. He nods at the seat. She says, “I think I should go.”

Raven makes an irritated noise at the back of her throat. “Just… Look, I’m trying, okay?” She looks up at Clarke with an expression that spells out a challenge. She tilts her head towards the boy beside her. “Bellamy thinks we should be friends. He doesn’t ask for much. I’m trying.” She clips each sentence short, voice flat.

Clarke sits. “You’re friends,” she says to Bellamy accusingly.

“Yeah,” he replies, tone light. Another awkward silence.

“Bell tells me you don’t know shit about the Trojans,” Raven says. Clarke can’t help the way her chin tilts up, but Raven just makes an impatient gesture. “You just haven’t spent enough time around him yet,” she explains. “He’ll force-feed you every goddamn myth there is.”

Bellamy grunts in mild offense. Without looking up from his own homework, he says, “Show us what you’ve got.”

Clarke stares at them, notes the displeased set of Raven’s mouth and the forced nonchalance in Bellamy’s downcast gaze, but she obliges.

 

Finn picks Raven up after dark, makes sure to cut the headlights and the engine long before it can wake her mom. As if, she thinks bitterly, her mom could be woken after several stiff drinks.

“Hey,” Finn says, grins in the dark. His smile seems genuine—everything he does seems genuine.

“Hey,” she repeats. She kisses him and tastes nothing strange. She’s been watching, searching for slip-ups, for a lie or a falseness in his voice. She hasn’t been able to find one.

She knows that Clarke broke up with him—Clarke told Bellamy and Bellamy told Raven—and the more time she spends with him, the more she thinks she can overlook it. It was just one mistake, right? He loves her and she loves him. It can’t be any simpler than that. She repeats that to herself a lot.

They hit Jasper Jordan’s party, but they don’t drink. Finn buys some weed off of Monty Green instead and then drives them up to GoSci, where they sit on the hood of the car and light up. Raven likes being high more than she likes being drunk. There’s something about alcohol—beyond the obvious chemistry—that makes her feel sick with guilt. Being high makes things lighter, makes sex better. She likes Finn high. He laughs when he kisses her and happily settles between her knees to eat her out. He tells her he loves her. It feels real.

It’s hard not to hold it against the other girl—Clarke Griffin, junior at Phoenix Academy, rich little white girl, no real problems whatsoever—but she does it anyway, just a little.

The truth is, it’s harder to hate Clarke than it is to like her. She’s…nice, Raven supposes. She’s fun to poke at. She gets comically worked up when she argues, blushes at the littlest thing, smiles more easily than the other two can. Raven guesses they’re friends now, or something. There are holes. They don’t so much as mention Finn, and Clarke has trouble looking Raven in the eye. It’s more of a they’re-both-friends-with-Bellamy thing. Whatever.

When Raven gets home, Lupe Reyes is sitting at the kitchen table. Raven stops short in the doorway. Alarm bells are going off in her head. Her mom should be at work. Or drunk. But she’s neither of those things. She looks Raven’s way and offers a wearier version of the smile Raven sometimes sees in the mirror. “Hi, _mija_.”

Raven relaxes just a tad. _Mija_ is a safe pet name. A sober pet name. _Sweetie, honey, birdie,_ and _baby girl_ are warnings. “Hi,” she says. She lets her backpack slide to the floor. “What are you doing home?”

Her mother pats herself on the cheek twice. Her right eyelid is drooping slightly. “Got fired.”

The sinking feeling in Raven’s chest is quickly replaced by panic. “Mom—”

“It’s okay,” Lupe says. “I called Carla already. I can sweep hair at the salon. Don’t worry, baby.”

Someone has to, Raven thinks. The panic tastes like bile. “Yeah,” she says, if nothing but to placate her. “It’s okay, Mom. I’m working at the garage this summer. I’ll see if I can babysit, too.”

“That’s good,” her mom sighs. She gets up slowly, and Raven can see the tiredness in her limbs. “I’m gonna go lie down.”

It’s a Thursday. Three thirty. Bellamy will come pick her up at four. They’ll stay out as long as Raven wants. All she has to say is _I don’t want to go home yet._ She needs that. At four ten he calls to tell her he can’t make it to their study session—he’s got to take his mom to work. Raven is well aware of their multiple-jobs situation. She assures him it’s fine. She sits on the couch watching a telenovella for ten more minutes. The smell of the house is sickening where it used to be pleasant. She calls Clarke.

“Hello?” There’s a warranted amount of confusion in Clarke’s voice.

“It’s Raven,” Raven says, and then remembers that caller ID exists. She plows on. “Bellamy says he can’t make it today, so session’s off.”

“Oh,” Clarke says. She clears her throat. There’s chatter in the background, and Raven wonders where she is. She doesn’t think much about Clarke outside of the hours they’re together. “You could’ve just texted.”

“I don’t text,” Raven says shortly. “We’ll see you Tuesday.”

“Wait,” Clarke blurts. Raven waits. “Um. We can still go, right? I can come pick you up.” Raven frowns in silence. Clarke says, “I kind of need you to explain imaginary numbers to me again.”

“Fine,” Raven says. She rattles off her address and hangs up abruptly. She sits on her porch and waits.

She’s never seen Clarke’s car before but it’s very…well. Expensive. Bells and whistles. Leather seats. Lots of space. That kind of thing. Raven’s mom’s car needs constant tinkering, and Bellamy’s is nicknamed the Clunker. Clarke’s car drives smoothly and silently.

“I’m glad you called,” Clarke offers.

“Why?”

“My mom was having a soiree,” says the other girl, puts the last word in a slightly more nasal, flamboyant tone.

“A what,” Raven says flatly.

“Party,” Clarke says, without missing a beat, without pausing to comment on Raven’s lack of society knowledge. “Early evening. High-brow. Suits. Pearls. Long speeches. Also known as hell.” She laughs to herself.

“Oh,” Raven mutters. “You’re welcome, then.” Silence rolls. Raven looks at Clarke. She’s not wearing _soiree attire,_ whatever that is. She’s wearing soft jeans and a hoodie. She’s also wearing makeup. Her eyelashes look longer. Her cheeks are pinker and so is her mouth. There are diamonds in her earlobes. She is, Raven thinks to herself once again, very pretty. Delicately pretty. White girl, europrincess pretty. Raven is reminded (once again) that she likes girls as much as she likes boys.

“So you don’t drive, huh?” Clarke says, if just to fill the silence.

“No,” Raven replies. “Can’t afford a car.”

“Can you?” Clarke asks. “Drive, I mean.”

“Yes,” Raven says. She never took her license test, but she doesn’t say that.

“How do you get to school?”

“I walk.”

They hit a stoplight, so Clarke can turn and blink at her with very blue eyes. “Walk?” she echoes. “But you live…”

“Far from Mecha,” Raven supplies. “Yeah. It’s what you have to do when you’re poor as dirt.”

There’s an uncomfortable silence. She kind of regrets the quip, but doesn’t take it back. She’s not an apologetic person.

They sit in their usual booth and it feels sort of empty, but they ignore it. Raven explains imaginary numbers slowly, curbing the impatience. It’s Bellamy who has patience, albeit not much. But Clarke learns quickly; after a few more questions she’s scribbling away.

“So you’ve been friends with Bellamy for a while?” she asks as she does so.

“Couple of years.” It feels like longer than that, though. Friendship with Bellamy is almost as comfortable as it used to be with Finn. Or it was. Is it friendship now? Or something else? Raven doesn’t like these questions.

“He’s nice,” Clarke says, offhand.

Raven stops chewing on her pencil briefly to reply, “That’s not what most people say about him.” She lets her gaze drift over to the empty space beside her. “But yes,” she relents. “He is.”

 

When Bellamy gets home, everything’s quiet.

The TV is silent, the lights off, not so much as a Coldplay song coming from his sister’s room. He kicks off his shoes, pads into the kitchen. The old clock on the wall tells him an incorrect time. The absence of pots or pans or anything burnt tells him tonight’s dinner was takeout. A plate is resting on the corner of the counter, wrapped in foil. The post-it on top reads his name in his mother’s careful hand. His mouth still tastes like Raven’s, so he eats. He does it without heating it up, fully aware of the loud microwave.

He checks his phone. Fifteen minutes ago he’d texted Raven: _You left your jacket in my car._ She does it and then forgets, goes on a rampage looking for it if he doesn’t remind her. She hasn’t texted back. She never does.

Clarke, on the other hand, always does. An hour ago she’d sent a screenshot of one of those obscene paintings on Greek jars, captioned with several question marks in a row. He hasn’t texted back yet. He was tied up at the time. He types back a quick reply, leaves his phone on the counter. He’s putting the dirty dishes into the washer when his sister appears in the doorway, wide awake and judgmental.

“Hey,” he says.

“Where were you?” she asks. She’s wearing an oversized shirt and sweats, her hair wild around her shoulders. She used to wear Hello Kitty pajamas to bed. She’s not ten years old anymore, though.

“Out.”

Octavia scoffs. She slides past him, grabs one of the few clean glasses off the shelf, and holds it under the tap. “Does she at least give you gas money?”

It’s one of those nights, then. He doesn’t answer. He knees the dishwasher shut and turns it on. He’s tired. She’s barely getting started.

“Doesn’t she have a boyfriend to drive her everywhere?”

“O—”

“Isn’t there somebody else for her to screw over?”

 _“Octavia,”_ he snaps. She goes rigid. He rarely ever says her name so harshly. “Stop.”

She looks at him with defiance in her eyes, in her jaw. She thrusts out the glass, sloshing water on the floor. “Mom has a migraine,” she tells him coldly. He takes the glass. She stomps off.

He clenches his jaw, then lets go. He turns for their mother’s room. The shades are drawn despite it being completely black outside, and it smells like it hasn’t been aired in a long while. He makes a mental note to open the windows tomorrow morning. His mom is a still figure on the left side of the bed. She’s in a sort of disturbing position, feet together, hands overlapping on her stomach. He’s reminded of how people are arranged in caskets. He touches her arm gently.

“Hm?” She raises a slow hand to peek out from under the wet towel she’s got over her eyes. She smiles. “Bellamy.”

“Hi, Mom.” He’s sure to speak in a soft, quiet voice. He gives her the water and watches her swallow down pills.

She reaches out to touch his cheek as she lies flat again. “How was school?”

“Okay.” He gets passing grades. She doesn’t know this. She doesn’t have time.

“Good boy,” she sighs. “Tell me a story.”

He holds her hand, tells her about the boy who flew too close to the sun. When she’s asleep he tiptoes out and, without so much as a glance at the cutting statement of Octavia’s locked door, crashes on his bed. His dreams are wispy and they slip from his memory like water; in the morning all he can remember is that Raven was in them.

It’s Tuesday. He takes Octavia home after school. He gets gas. He picks up Raven from Mecha and heads to the diner. They’ve got maybe fifteen minutes before Clarke shows up. He doesn’t see the cut until Anita the waitress makes a comment.

“Shit, honey,” she says suddenly, in the middle of refilling a coffee. “What happened to your face?”

Raven says, “Accident. I fell off my bike.”

When Anita’s gone Bellamy grabs Raven’s chin and turns her face so he can see the neat slice over her cheekbone. He feels a flash of irritation. She’d made sure to stand on his right, gone out of her way to keep her good cheek to him. He actually might have missed it; she’s that good and he’s that stupid. She jerks out of his grip.

He says, “You don’t own a bike.” She doesn’t know how to ride one, anyway. She told him once, in an even, measured tone. Nobody taught her.

“I stole one,” she replies coolly. “And I fell off of it.”

They stare at each other. Her chin’s angled up in a dare. He already knows she won’t ask or say _please_. She’ll say they’re not in this for the feelings, that she doesn’t need the concern. He can fight her, but it’s doubtful he’ll win. Maybe if he says the words stuck to the roof of his mouth. _I care about you. I—_

The bell on the door jingles. Clarke rushes in, eyes bright, mouth grinning. “Hi,” she chirps, sliding into the booth.

“Hey,” Raven says.

Clarke hears the chill in her tone, looks at the chasm between them. “Everything okay?” she asks,  her expression falling. Her eyes zero in on Raven’s cheek. “What happened?”

A beat of silence. “I was trying to teach her how to ride a bike,” Bellamy says. “She ate shit.”

Raven says, “You’re a shitty teacher.”

Clarke frowns. It’s not a great cover-up. The cut is too precise to be from a fall. Clarke probably knows that. Bellamy’s thinking it was more like shattered glass, a plate flung across the room. Something like that. But Clarke just says, “You don’t know how to ride a bike?”

“Fuck off.”

Raven’s hand finds his knee under the table. He doesn’t know if it’s a thank you or an apology. She’s not very good at either.

 

 

Clarke’s got an eye for detail. It’s how she captures things in graphite and paper and it’s how she gets to know the people around her.

Bellamy is a very light sleeper. She knows this because he sleeps a lot—in the back of their French class under his arms, at the diner with his chin in his hand, even for a second standing at his locker like a frozen frame—and wakes up a lot, usually with a mechanical flutter of eyelids. It takes very little to wake him.

Once he’d dozed off with his cheek propped up on his hand and Clarke said to Raven, in a hushed tone, “He’s asleep.”

He’d opened his eyes, said, “Not anymore, he’s not.”

Clarke doesn’t ask, but she’s gleaned that it’s because he’s working two jobs on top of school. She still sees him at The Drop sometimes, exchanges smiles. She doesn’t know what his other job is. The snap-to, instant, jerky way he comes back to consciousness tells her he’s restless, maybe even afraid. Maybe, at some point in his life, it’d been necessarily to wake up that fast, to be ready in a second. She doesn’t know what that means, except something dark.

She does know that they both have issues at home. They skirt around the topic of fathers like cats avoiding water, tight-mouthed and narrow-eyed. Bellamy says _my mom_ with a certain reverence in his voice that is lost on Clarke. Raven says the same words like expletives.

Clarke has never seen Raven sleep. She’s never even seen her close her eyes for longer than the span of a blink. Raven is always watching. She catches everything on their faces—if she’s arguing with Clarke and Bellamy rolls his eyes beside her, she’ll say, “I saw that, asshole” or if it’s the other way around, “Let me know when you can make a fucking point.” Clarke thinks, never aloud, that it’s because she doesn’t trust anything enough to let it go unseen.

It’s Thursday. Clarke has a test on ancient Persian government tomorrow and has no intention of actually studying for it. “Where’s Raven?” she asks as she drops into their booth. It’s rare that she sees one of them without the other.

“Home,” Bellamy says vaguely.

They sit in silence for the next fifteen minutes while he scribbles down notes and she stares glumly at her anatomy flash cards. Altogether the stack of them is a whole inch thick. He says into the silence, “You ever hear of this thing called Quizlet?”

She pauses in the middle of flipping a card over. “It’s better to write everything down,” she says.

He half-smiles, as though he hadn’t expected that answer. He holds out his hand. She stares at it. “Come on,” he prods. “I’ll quiz you.”

“I don’t exactly need help,” she tells him. But she puts the cards in his hand.

He flips through them, mouthing the words. He says, “Name all the bones of the hand.”

She does.

He says, “Now the muscles.”

She does, stumbles over the last few.

He says, “Name the bones of the arm.”

Clarke blurts, “Is everything okay with Raven?” A pause. “At home, I mean.” She’s thinking of the obvious tension she’d walked in on a few days ago, the cut on Raven’s face and the way Bellamy seemed to, however reluctantly, lie for her.

“That’s incorrect.”

“Bellamy.”

They both know Raven would hate her for asking. “I don’t know,” he says after a moment. This seems to bother him.

“You don’t know?” Clarke echoes.

He looks up at her, frown creasing his face. There are little parentheses that chase the corners of his mouth, but she likes them better when he smiles. “Why would I?” he asks.

She turns red for absolutely no reason, looks down at her bag to hide it. “Sorry,” she says. “I just thought, you two being best friends and all…” She means it to be sarcastic.

He lifts one shoulder and lets it drop. “She doesn’t tell me everything,” he replies grudgingly.

Clarke has an eye for detail, alright. So it doesn’t take her long to realize there’s something going on between them. They’re little things, but they seem obvious and loud once she’s noticed them. For instance, it takes her five whole minutes to realize that Raven’s t-shirt looks familiar because she’d seen it on Bellamy on Monday. After that she’s very aware that occasionally Bellamy’s clothes—his sweatshirt with the hawk on it, his leather jacket, even his socks—end up on Raven.

It occurs to her that the way Raven presses her fingers against Bellamy’s wrist to shut him up sometimes isn’t a typical gesture. More friendly is the way she calls him _pendejo_ under her breath or shoves his face away from her with the heel of her palm. Then Clarke realizes they’re very comfortable in each other’s space; they lean close together when they’re talking, reach out to rest fingers on arms or palms on knees when they’re laughing. Raven thumbs at ketchup on Bellamy’s chin and easily, carelessly sticks the thumb in her mouth.

Friends don’t look at each other the way Bellamy looks at Raven.

She thinks she sees them together ( _together_ together), but it’s only once and only for a second. She’s pulling out of the diner parking lot post-study session when she catches a glimpse of them in his car as she passes by. It looks like them leaning too close together, looks like Bellamy’s big hand covering the back of Raven’s head, sifting through her hair. She blinks. She could have imagined it.

She doesn’t ask, and they don’t tell her. It’s not like they’re hiding it, but they’re not open about it either. Clarke would call it hypocritical, because it is, but she can’t. She can’t even say Finn’s name to Raven’s face. It’s none of her business, anyway.

It’s just a little insulting. And okay, maybe she’s just a little jealous. That thought surprises her, then troubles. She doesn't get jealous. She rarely even gets angry. So what's bugging her? Is it that Raven is cheating on Finn? That she's involved with Bellamy? That she gets to have both? Or all three? Clarke shakes the thoughts off. She doesn't get jealous.

 

“You can stay with me,” says Bellamy, “if you want.”

Raven freezes. This isn’t really the best time to talk about this. She’s pinned under him, jeans still clinging to one foot, shirt rucked up around her armpits. Maybe that’s why he brings it up. So she can’t run. She hooks her fingers into the front of his jeans instead. “That’s not what I want,” she says, and tugs.

He lets out an uneven breath. His mouth is slack like it always is when he’s turned on. But he isn’t so easily distracted. “Just for a few days,” he tells her, slides his hand further up, under her bra strap.

She’d give him a warning look if he wasn’t mouthing at her neck. Finn’s on an impromptu football retreat. A weekend bender. (It isn’t lost on her that the cheerleading squad is also on an impromptu retreat.) She hasn’t seen him for two days. Bellamy seemed more put-off by the cut on her cheek than he would have been, than she is.

“She’s not hurting me,” she says, even though it isn’t quite true. It _had_ been an accident, but she’s not sure he’d believe her. A piece of flying ceramic caught her after her mom had thrown the third dish. No big deal. Her mom had shrieked and insisted on cleaning her up, as if she was capable of putting on Band-Aids or kissing boo-boos drunk.

“A few days,” he mutters to her jawline.

Raven isn’t into doing things just to make other people happy. She expertly pops the button on his jeans—a smoother, easier one than that on Finn’s jeans—and reaches inside to touch him. He's a solid weight in her hand. As she tightens her grip, he makes a drawn-out noise in the back of his throat that thumps in her chest like it’s a physical blow.

They sleep after they fuck, which used to be against Raven’s silent rules. Even so, they don’t cuddle. They roll their backs to each other in silence. After an hour or so of fitful dreams, Raven’s effort to get up without waking him is wasted. He feels the shift in weight because he’s the goddamn lightest sleeper in the world, props himself on his elbow to aim a sleepy frown her way.

“Water,” she whispers. He flops back into sleep.

Raven’s been in Bellamy’s house before. She’s stayed over before, sometimes too high or too drunk or too tired. It’s always been when the house is empty, though, when Bellamy’s mom is away and his sister is sleeping at somebody else’s place. Now, standing in the kitchen, she feels like the presence of other heartbeats is pressing and warning. _Tick tock_ , says the clock.

She’s gulping down water when Blake the Younger emerges from the other half of the house. Each goes rigid at the sight of the other. Octavia’s dressed in tight jeans and a glittery top, dark makeup turning her eyes and mouth intense. She’s as pretty as her brother, although in a different way. Her loveliness is sharper. Raven is reminded that they’re only half-blooded.

“You going somewhere?” Raven asks at last.

“No,” Octavia retorts. "You living here now?"

“No,” Raven replies.

"Good." Octavia shoulders a tiny purse and pushes past, towards the front door. “I’d ask you not to tell him anything, but..” There’s an insult in there somewhere, Raven’s sure.

“Uh-huh,” she says, doesn’t mean it to sound as aggressive as it does.

Octavia stops in the doorway, having opened the door silently. She takes in Raven’s attire, which isn’t much more than boyshorts and Bellamy’s shirt. Her eyeshadow looks like warpaint. Her lip curls. “You’re a real bitch, you know that?” This question is punctuated by the door shutting behind her.

“Yeah,” Raven mutters to the silence. She puts the glass on the counter and pads back to Bellamy’s room.

In the morning she sits at the old kitchen table with one heel planted on the chair and her arm curled around her shin, watching him fry eggs in his underwear. She likes the look of him in this setting, likes the ripple of muscle under his skin and the way he shifts his weight from foot to foot as he stands there. It makes her feel guilty.

“My mom’s working late the next few days,” he tells her casually as he sets a plate in front of her. “You’re good to sleep over. I’ll even change the sheets.”

Raven says nothing.

He turns back to the stove. “We can call Clarke. Watch _The Godfather Part II._ ”

Raven says, “Finn’s coming home today.” She doesn’t like the way the words feel. Like four sharp prods to a yellowing bruise.

Bellamy says nothing. He dumps the pan into the sink and turns the faucet on so the water runs, sputters, and hisses into steam. Then, with his back to her, “Okay.”

Raven stares at her eggs. _Yeah_ , she thinks. _A real bitch_.

 

Monday, four pm. The diner smells like coffee and fresh pies and Anita the waitress’s floral perfume. Sal the Turkey Club Guy is sitting on the end of the counter like always, stinking up the air around him with his stale cigarette smell. He turns two watery, sunken eyes Bellamy’s way.

“How was school, kid?” he asks. He’d called Bellamy _son_ once. The look on Bellamy’s face was apparently a strong enough deterrent not to do it ever again.

“Fine,” Bellamy replies. He pats Sal on the back. “Same shit.”

“Different day.” The old man’s laugh sounds like a hacking cough.

Anita smiles bright and wide. “Want some fries, sweetie?” she asks. “On the house.” She waves a hand impatiently as he opens his mouth to protest. He’ll have to fight to make sure it gets paid for. She’s one of those people who doesn’t quite get it; she’s not doing him a favor by essentially telling him there’s something about him that’s pitiful.

“I owe you a pack of cigarettes,” he tells her when she brings him the plate.

She wrinkles her nose, sucks her tongue against her teeth. “You don’t play fair, honey,” she says. He grins, knowing he’s won, and she rolls her eyes.

He turns his eyes towards his homework dismally. It’s more boring than annoying. He’d purposefully avoided taking AP classes so he’d have more time to work, but at times like this he regrets it. Every time he has to sit through a Disney movie in English class he wishes he were studying what Clarke is—old texts that have that yellowed-page vibe, language that needs careful eyes, tales with a thousand different interpretations. Instead he’s writing about the basic concept of beauty. _What do YOU find beautiful in a person?_ Bullshit like that.

The bell on the door jingles. Clarke breezes in, half out of uniform with her hair knotted in a haphazard bun. She’s unsmiling, but cheerful all the same. The sight of her worms a smile out of everyone—even Sal, which is rare. But that’s the thing about Clarke, he thinks as she approaches the table.

“Hey, stranger,” she says as she drops into her side of the booth. She’s been drawing today; he can tell by the graphite lining her cuticles and streaking down her temple, the pencil securing her hair to her head.

“Hey,” he repeats.

“Where’s…?” She juts her chin pointedly at the empty space beside him.

He says, in what he hopes is a nonchalant tone, “She’s busy.”

This, along with _she had plans_ and _she’s got some stuff to take care of,_ is code for _she’s with Finn._ Clarke doesn’t react except to hum and start unpacking her things. He appreciates that.

“Good day?” he asks.

She lets one shoulder rise and fall, so her sweater slips off one shoulder. She pulls it back up absently. “Almost got T-boned on the way here,” she says.

He looks back down at his essay, where he has written exactly two sentences. “Gotta be careful out there, princess.”

She laughs. “The world’s a big bad place, darlin’,” she says in a mock-deep voice.

He eyes her in mild surprise. He sometimes forgets, despite all his name-calling, that where she comes from the sun always shines and unicorns shit candy. She sees him looking. “What?” she says.

“Nothing,” he replies.

A half-hour later he’s down to his last paragraph—he’s only giving this a standard five and even that feels like a waste of time—and Clarke is working on an ornate sketch of a seahorse. All her drawings (at least, the ones he’s seen) reflect her eye for nature.

“Did you even bring homework?” he asks abruptly.

Clarke’s eyes flick up to him, then back down at the seahorse. “I didn’t have any,” she says.

He frowns. He’s fully aware that she has a cluttered schedule featuring on-and-off club meetings, family obligations, and other things she has to shuffle to show up. “Then why did you come?”

“I didn’t think I needed an excuse to hang out with you,” she says.

Whatever he was expecting her answer to be, that wasn’t it. He opens his mouth, closes his mouth. Clarke, bemused by his lack of comeback, returns to her sketch smiling.

They stand outside in the biting cold and he watches as Clarke wrestles with her sweatshirt, pulling her hair completely out of order so that her bun flops to the side of her head.

Bellamy snorts. “Cute.”

Scowling, she starts to yank it out. “Everyone’s a critic,” she says.

He shakes his head as he checks his phone. Raven hasn’t texted, but Octavia has. Pick me up. The presence of a period in the message means he’s in hot water slash deep shit. Probably both. Briefly, he tries to think up an excuse to text Raven, but gives up almost immediately.

“Hey,” Clarke says. She puts a warm hand on his forearm, pushing down his phone. “Aren’t you cold?” she asks.

He’s braving the weather in a short-sleeved t-shirt and wishing he isn’t. Somebody had stolen Octavia’s hoodie at school and he’d given her his. He'll live. He shrugs, lies, “Not really.”

Clarke clearly doesn’t believe him, but she just smiles. Raven’s smile is sharp, tapered to points at the ends, full of blunt teeth. Clarke’s is soft around the edges, like the borders of an old photograph. “Don’t get sick,” she says. “I’ll fail my final.”

He laughs. “That’d be a disaster,” he agrees.

She lets go of his arm, shoulders her bag. “Same time next week,” she says, and turns away, blonde hair swinging, step springing. Her fingerprints stain his arm in graphite.

Anita likes to say that she's a kickass judge of character. The week after Clarke first stepped foot in the diner, she had remarked, “You should bring that girl around here more often." And she'd smiled like she knew a secret, adding, “She makes this place brighter.”

He watches Clarke go, a spot of color on a gray day, and thinks Anita maybe had a point.

 

Raven’s Saturday night is spent not out with her boyfriend or her boy toy or doing the environmental science project due Monday, but cleaning vomit off the bathroom floor and her mother’s unconscious body.

She was gone when Raven woke up that morning, which wasn’t totally unusual. Raven made breakfast out of stale toast and the one good banana left in the house, laid around watching TV and half-assing an essay, until late that night. She was startled awake by the sound of the door slamming, of shoes being kicked off into the wall. She waited until she heard the thump of the bathroom door before getting up, the floor cold against her bare feet.

Lupe, thankfully, was alone. She was still wearing her work clothes, lipstick smeared over her left cheek. Raven hovered in the hallway watching her haphazardly wipe makeup off and tug at her hair. Not until Lupe bent over the toilet and passed out did she bother coming out of the shadows.

She’s not any better at moving her mother than she was when she was eight. The best she can do is drag her into a slightly more comfortable position and stuff a pillow under her head. She knows from experience that Lupe needs to be near the toilet so that when she wakes herself up with the urge to puke, she can do so without stumbling through the halls or hurting herself.

Raven stands in the doorway watching her for a minute. Lupe always looks less burdened when she sleeps. Raven is hit by a wave of pity and shame. She thinks, once again, about pouring every drop of alcohol in the house down the drain, but that just reminds her of the last time she did. She was eleven, and the fit of panic that she witnessed wasn’t something she could easily forget. It didn’t matter anyway. She turns back to her room.

The next morning, she finds that the bathroom is empty. She doesn't think twice about it. She goes to school.

It’s Monday. She finds Finn hovering by her locker, looking painfully heartthrob-like in his letterman jacket and easy grin. She saw him yesterday. She knows there are no marks on him, no evidence. But she still gets an acidic feeling in her stomach when a short skirt floats by him or when a group of girls turns its eyes on her in the hallway.

“Hey,” Raven says liltingly.

“Hey,” he echoes back, kisses her on the mouth.

“Don’t you have shop right now?” she asks, grabbing the lock.

“Ditching,” he replies. He watches her fight the dial. “Wanna come?”

She shakes her head, finally wrenches the stupid thing open. “Calc test,” she explains breezily. She throws her unneeded books into the locker and grabs her U.S. history textbook. Finn is staring at her. “What?”

He says, with a tightness to his mouth, “Blake said something weird to me this morning.”

Raven doesn’t like his tone. He and Bellamy have almost never found common ground, except when it comes to John Murphy and anarchy. She turns back to the locker with her mouth pursed. “The She-Blake?” she asks lightly.

“He-Blake.”

She strips off her jacket and throws that in the locker, too. “Was it about how I kicked his ass in Call of Duty?”

Finn frowns. “He said, ‘Make sure Raven’s okay with her mom.’”

Raven stills. “I have no idea what he’s talking about,” she says finally.

Finn’s brows crease. “Raven,” he says. “I know when you’re lying.” She says nothing to this. He leans close, eyes wide and genuine and warm. She loves him. She _loves_ him. “You know you can tell me anything, right?” he asks.

 _I’m cheating on you,_ she thinks. “Yeah,” she says.

“And you know you can stay with me if you need a couple of days.” He’s studying her face, looking for something. He can’t seem to find it. “Right?”

“Yeah,” she repeats. She slams the locker closed, and it sounds like a gunshot. “It’s nothing. Bellamy’s full of shit.” With a worried look and a frown, Finn lets it go.

Fifty minutes later Raven catches Bellamy coming out of the boys’ bathroom on the second floor and shoves him back into it with all her body weight.

He makes a noise of surprise. “Raven, what the—?”

“You’re full of shit,” she tells him while she checks the other stalls to make sure they’re empty. When she turns back, he’s got the full _Bellamy on the defense_ thing going, a look that consists of folded arms and/or balled fists, firmly planted feet, and flared nostrils.

“What are you talking about?”

“Going to Finn behind my back?”

His expression tightens. _Yeah,_ she thinks. _That._ “I figured if you weren’t going to let _me_ help you…” he trails off, gives a forced shrug.

“I don’t need anyone’s help,” Raven says.

“He knew you were lying, right?” Bellamy asks. She sucks in a breath. There’s a hardness to his mouth and jaw that she hasn’t had aimed at her for a while. “Did he even try to find out why? Did he even care?”

“You are _way_ out of line,” she says coldly.

“I care about you,” he snaps. “Doesn’t that mean something?”

“ _Fuck you_ is what it means,” she retorts, an instinctive retaliation that she instantly regrets. The insult hangs in the silence. They stare at each other, and he is the first to look away. She waits, but his mouth is clamped shut against something he won’t say. "Forget it," she scoffs.

She wrenches open the door, and slams it shut behind her as hard as she can.

 

Clarke and Bellamy go to the party together because Raven and Finn go to the party together.

They don’t say that, of course. Bellamy mentions it to her on Wednesday offhandedly, carelessly.

“It’s a Mount Weather Prep thing,” he says. “A friend of mine’s throwing it as a last kick before Christmas break. You in?”

He’s not meeting her eyes while he talks, instead occupied with typing out something on his phone. He’s slumped down almost flat, holding it over his face. Clarke wonders, very briefly, if he’s faking it so he won’t have to look at her. She dismisses the idea; she’s never known him to hide, especially when it comes to her. He’s always upfront, always blunt.

“Mount Weather, huh?” she asks.

He gives a shrug, still not looking up. “She’s a good friend.”

Clarke taps her pen against her teeth, eyes drifting to the very empty air beside him. “Uh-huh,” she murmurs.

He finishes typing, locks his phone, lets it rest on his chest over his sternum. He looks up at the ceiling, which Clarke knows is faded tiles full of tiny dots that you could spend hours counting. “Raven might be there,” he says. His tone makes it clear exactly why it won’t be the three of them going together.

“Right,” Clarke says lamely. She hasn’t seen Finn since they broke up. He hasn’t called. Seventy-five percent of her is glad for that. (The other twenty-five, to her dismay, dreams up scenarios where everything worked out and they lived happily ever after.)

“We don’t have to go,” Bellamy says. His lids are closed now, lashes making tiny shadows on the hollows under his eyes. She’s inclined to think he’d just go without her.

Against common sense and better judgment, Clarke says, “No, it sounds like fun.”

He picks her up after dark on Friday in the Clunker, which is enough of a herald that he doesn’t bother announcing his presence with either text or knock. From the living room window he’s just a shadow in the driver’s seat, one big hand curled over the steering wheel.

“Mom, I’m leaving!” Clarke bellows into the house.

Her mother unexpectedly appears in the kitchen doorway, frowning. “Who with?” she asks.

Caught off-guard, Clarke fumbles her keys. “Bellamy,” she says.

Her dad tips his head back in his chair so he can look at Clarke upside-down. “Raven, too?”

“Just Bellamy.”

Her parents share a look that makes Clarke wholly uncomfortable. They know she’s just as interested in girls as she is in boys, but she doesn’t think they quite understand. She’s pretty sure the thought of her alone with boys sets off klaxons in her parents’ heads in a way that the thought of her alone with girls doesn’t. She books it before they can slap her with a curfew and climbs into the Clunker. Bellamy’s wearing a soft-colored t-shirt that exposes his collarbones—one that had been the object of half-teasing admiration from both Clarke and Raven—and his usual jeans.

“So,” Clarke says, fiddling with the eyelet hem of her shorts, “who’s this friend?” When he doesn’t answer right away, she prods, “Come on. Nobody likes Mountain Men.” She puts the last two words in a mocking tone and he snorts.

“Her name’s Maya,” he replies. “She’s a junior, about as tiny as you. Loves O’Keefe and Kahlo and Marx.”

“Sounds like my kind of girl,” Clarke says, and Bellamy laughs. “How d’you know her?”

There’s a pause. He says, “She did me a favor once.” He doesn’t elaborate, and Clarke turns to fiddling with the radio. She knows better than to pry.

Maya is, true to his word, Clarke’s height and young in a way that is refreshing and sweet. She’s cute in a soft, pastel sort of sense. She hugs Bellamy like an old friend, and hugs Clarke, too, after about two minutes of conversation. Her smile marks her as the kind of good-natured person that nobody can deny, which is probably why nobody gives them second looks as outsiders.

Clarke grabs herself a beer. She sips and grimaces. “I hate beer,” she says.

He aims a pointed look at her. “Then why are you drinking it?”

She rolls her eyes and drinks some more. After downing it, she’s got the courage and the skill to dominate three rounds of the nearest drinking game while he looks on in mild amusement. She genuinely hopes this’ll put the _princess_ thing to bed for good, but she doubts it.

Parties obviously aren’t Bellamy’s element; he stands uncomfortably in the crowd, made bigger by the people around him, unusually tense like an animal about to be caught in a trap. Clarke recognizes the residual effects of someone who barely fits in, a color that doesn’t quite match or a tile just out of place on a mosaic. She tries to make him more comfortable, but she doesn’t have the power that alcohol does. Pretty soon, they’re crushing every challenger in beer pong and getting obnoxious about it. When she makes the winning shots, he claps her on the back and lets his hand linger.

The Greenground kids that slink in half an hour later stick out in a different way. Like sore thumbs, like faces from sketches on the news. Mount Weather kids scatter like mice before them. Clarke stares at them, is mostly just glad that none of them are her exes. She watches as they scare a group of Weather kids away from the beer and raises her brows. “Think we’ll see a fight?” she says to Bellamy. When he doesn’t reply, she turns toward him with a frown. “Bellamy?”

He’s gripping his solo cup a little more tightly than he should be, eyes trained on something across the room. She follows his gaze. On the other side of the room stands a familiar long-haired, broad-shouldered figure, laughing loudly at somebody else’s joke. Clarke knows he’s not what has Bellamy’s attention, though. More likely it’s the dark pair of eyes looking at them from over Finn’s shoulder. With a cold purse of her mouth, Raven turns her gaze away from them and curls a hand around Finn’s hip pointedly.

Bellamy’s expression is one of distant bitterness.

“Hey.” She touches his wrist to draw him a little closer, and he looks at her. “Maybe this was a bad idea,” she suggests.

“Maybe,” he repeats, eyes flicking back.

“Don’t you love this song?” she asks. She sways her hips, flutters her hands, grins as he laughs. She puts her hands on his shoulders and pulls and pushes him to the beat until he caves. He’s a better dancer than her, which was to be expected. There is a certain grace in his movements that was never lost on Clarke.

She’s pulling some shitty I-can’t-dance move when she looks over again, and this time it’s Finn watching, gaze fixed not Clarke but on the back of Bellamy’s head. Beyond him Raven’s ponytail whips the air as she knocks back a shot.

Bellamy puts his hands on Clarke’s hips and turns them so he’s blocking her view of them. “Bad idea,” he reminds her.

Clarke drags her eyes over the jut of his collarbones, the curve of his mouth. Something stirs under her skin. “I’ve got one of those,” she says. She curls a hand over the back of his neck, looks up at him with an eyebrow raised. He offers no resistance when she tugs him down so she can kiss him.

It tastes a little like beer but mostly like him, and his mouth is a lot softer than she’d expected. His hand is a nice pressure on the small of her back. They pull back to look at each other, to gauge each other’s reactions. They both offer slow grins, and this time he kisses her—less experimentally, more hungrily. It’s not about anyone else this time.

Clarke laughs. “Wanna get out of here?” she jokes.

They hook up in the back of his car, a tangle of limbs and half-removed clothes smushed in the small space. He thumps an elbow against the ceiling trying to get his shirt off and she knocks the back of her head on the door with the rhythm of it. The buckle of the seatbelt digs into her shoulder and one of his knees keeps slipping off the seat, but they both manage to get off.

“Good idea,” Bellamy says, but his voice falters as he does. His curls are sticking to his forehead, his mouth half-open and a little swollen. His hand is warm on Clarke’s knee, fingers brushing her inner thigh. There’s a fluttering in her stomach that isn’t unpleasant at all.

“Great idea,” she agrees.

Neither of them ask where they go from here.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be posting this in two parts. It'll probably take some time since I haven't actually written it yet. Hang in there!
> 
> I'm [wolfbellamy](http://www.wolfbellamy.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


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